12 Startups in 12 months w/ Digital Nomad Pieter Levels

I am Pieter Levels, the founder of Nomad List, the biggest crowdsourced city database and digital nomads social network. I also founded Remote OK, the biggest remote jobs board in the world.

After I was quickly going broke in 2014, I started building “12 startups in 12 months” which got a lot of attention and forced me to ship a new app every month.

Most of those apps didn’t become successful, but some did: Nomad List became a real startup with millions of monthly users, multiple acquisition offers, $15,000 to $25,000/month revenue in membership fees, while having a real cultural impact of getting tens of thousands of people to travel and work remotely.

Remote OK started as a basic jobs board for remote workers, and grew out to now be the highest traffic generating remote careers platform with about $10,000 to $20,000/month revenue in job posts.

I am also Product Hunt’s Maker of the Year 2015 and 2017, winner of Product Hunt’s Side Project of the Year 2017, currently the #4 most upvoted Product Hunt maker, got my apps multiple times to #1 on Hacker News and I was on the frontpage of Reddit twice (with Nomad List and Hoodmaps).

I don’t have the keys to success, so I can only tell you what worked for me. A few principles I hold is that I don’t take external funding, I do everything myself, I mostly don’t really hire, I automate a lot which means I have lots of robots working for me 24/7, I like transparency and I hate business bullshit. That means I share my revenue, share the problems I have and the successes when things do work. This presentation is pretty much that!